Fāṭimah al-Baqqālī

Biography

In June 2010 an official ceremony was held in Turkey at which an ijaza was handed to a young Emirati calligrapher by the wife of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, then prime minister. Fāṭimah al-Baqqālī had been working toward that day for almost sixteen years.

She was born on 1 January 1974 in Dubai. Her interest in Arabic writing, by her own account, began in primary school. From 1994 to 1998 she studied at the Arabic Calligraphy and Islamic Arts Institute and graduated with distinction. She then trained at the Sharjah Centre for Arabic Calligraphy and Ornament, part of the Sharjah Department of Culture and Information, until 2001. She began in the Arab tradition, in the manner of the well-known Iraqi calligrapher Hashim al-Baghdadi: Ruq’ah, Naskh, Diwani, Diwani Jali and Nastaliq. From 2002 to 2005 her teacher was the Iraqi calligrapher Salah al-Din Shirzad, with whom she studied Kufic, Thuluth and Islamic ornament. From 2005 to 2009 she studied in Istanbul with Sheikh Hasan Çelebi and Davut Bektaş; from Çelebi she also learned Ta’liq in the Turkish manner. She attended courses in manuscript gilding with the gilder Saime Hasan Çelebi in 2005–2007. She was sent to Turkey on the order of the ruler of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, who had decided to send talented calligraphers there. Her first ijaza, in Thuluth and Naskh, was issued in 2008 by Hasan Çelebi, Davut Bektaş, Ferhad Kurlu and Ayten Tiryaki. She received the second, in Diwani and Diwani Jali, from Hasan Çelebi in 2010, under the supervision of IRCICA, the Research Centre for Islamic History, Art and Culture in Istanbul. She is regarded as the first woman from the United Arab Emirates and the whole Gulf to hold such certificates, and as the first in the region to teach Arabic calligraphy with official recognition.

She started modestly: she put her works on display in an art-supplies shop in a Dubai shopping mall and sold them at low prices so that people would get to know the art. Later the ruler of Sharjah gave her a studio in the House of Calligraphers, in the Arabic Calligraphy Square in Sharjah. From 2008 to 2018 she worked as a project executive at the Dubai Centre for Arabic Calligraphy, helped organise calligraphy exhibitions in the Emirates and coordinated the Dubai International Arabic Calligraphy Exhibition. She was a member of the Emirates Fine Arts Society. She exhibited in Mainz, Germany (2002), at an Arab arts festival in China (2006), at an exhibition supported by the UAE embassy in Washington State (2007), and in Istanbul at the exhibition “Women Calligraphers of the World” (June 2010). In January 2016 she took part in the exhibition “Diwani Jali” in Dubai alongside Hasan Çelebi and other calligraphers, and in November 2016 she showed work at the exhibition “The Homeland and the Martyr” with Hossam Khurshid.

Awards: first place in the Arabic calligraphy competition of the Modern Creativity Centre (2001); the Al Owais Award for the best work by young artists in Arabic calligraphy in 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2008; first place in calligraphy at the Emirati Women’s Award for Arts and Literature (2004); a symbolic prize for Diwani at the seventh international competition named after Hashim al-Baghdadi, in Turkey; in 2021 she was honoured by the Cairo International Forum of Arabic Calligraphy.

She chose her texts herself: the Qur’an, hadith, aphorisms, Arabic poetry. The work went in stages: choosing the text, several pencil sketches, selecting the best, a template, then the final version on paper treated with natural materials or tinted with tea. She wrote with a reed pen and traditional ink, sometimes gold.

She died on 27 March 2024, aged fifty.